The Weekend Reader

Reporter

Associated Press

Dorian S. Nakamoto listens during an interview, March 6, 2014 in Los Angeles. Nakamoto, the man that Newsweek claims is the founder of Bitcoin, denies he had anything to do with it and says he had never even heard of the digital currency until his son told him he had been contacted by a reporter.

The Face Behind Bitcoin Who is the man behind Bitcoin, the most controversial currency of our time? Newsweek’s Leah McGrath Goodman goes in search of Satoshi Nakamoto, who the magazine credits as Bitcoin’s creator, though he claims to have only heard of it when told about it by his son. “It seemed ludicrous that the man credited with inventing Bitcoin – the world’s most wildly successful digital currency, with transactions of nearly $500 million a day at its peak – would retreat to Los Angeles’s San Gabriel foothills, hole up in the family home and leave his estimated $400 million of Bitcoin riches untouched. It seemed similarly implausible that Nakamoto’s first response to my knocking at his door would be to call the cops.” Mr. Nakamoto would only say that he was “no longer involved,” and the police insisted the chat was at an end. But an investigation of the online currency and its progenitor reveal that most of what’s understood about Bitcoin is myth, and the facts of its existence are stranger than most people appreciate.

Can a startup help publishers cut out the social media giants? The Internet may have once promised to bring businesses and consumers closer, but in the media business and many others, it brought more middlemen into the marketplace. Fast Company’s Adam Popescu asks whether three new startups can do for media distribution what the web was supposed to have done for e-commerce. “The thing is–people have tried this before,” he writes. “The battle to free publishers from distribution and advertising has turned once-promising companies into casualties, such as the short-lived digital magazine platform Glossi, or journalist Paul Carr’s NSFW Corp. Others like Readability failed to achieve any kind of mainstream adoption.” Even so, Inkshares, Beacon, and Aerbook, he says, could be game changers.

Copyrighted Coffee and the Internet of Things Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen writes about how a distant cousin to Digital Rights Management software, once seen as the savior of online music and film from pirates, is being deployed – to sell coffee. Green Mountain Coffee’s single-serving Keurig machines have changed the business, Mr. Wohlsen writes, “but Green Mountain doesn’t want copycats taking the business it pioneered away. That’s why CEO Brian Kelley says its new coffee makers will include technology that prevents people from using pods from other companies. The approach has been compared to DRM restrictions that limit the sharing of digital music and video online. But more than just curbing your coffee choices, Green Mountain’s protections portend the kind of closed system that could gut the early promise of the Internet of Things — a promise that hinges on a broad network of digital, connected devices remaking the everyday world.”

Nearly across the board, mid-market executives are hiring new employees, buying new technology solutions, acquiring businesses to reach new markets and preparing IPOs, according to a Deloitte survey of more than 500 mid-market executives. But companies are running up against a number of constraints as they seek to expand, particularly in acquiring and retaining skilled talent.